


Epilogue

by orphan_account



Series: Safe Haven Tales [1]
Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brenda is a snarkmonster, Fluff, M/M, Post TDC Newt Lives, Safe Haven story time, so goddamn fluffy I'm gonna die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 23:32:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19778749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Newt and Thomas share a story with their daughter of the time Newt killed a Griever.A new ending to the book and movie-verse, where Newt lives and makes it to the Safe Haven and starts his new life with Tommy.





	Epilogue

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. <3

“Did I ever tell you about the time your dad killed a Griever?”

“Thomas…”

“No he didn’t,” the girl said, her voice high, syllables rounded and imprecise. She sat cross-legged on the beach, small hands grasping her skinny ankles, looking up at her dads with a mixture of disbelief and wonder. 

“Oh yes he did!” Sometimes Thomas seemed like a big kid, especially when he got animated while talking to their daughter, and this was one of those times. He wore a broad smile and his amber eyes were alight - Newt could see him spinning up the story in his mind already.

“Tommy,” Newt put a hand on his arm, looking up at the man’s chin from where he was currently leaning against his chest, head on his shoulder. “I don’t like this story.”

“Aw, c’mon Newt, please?”

“Yeah, _pleeeeease?_ ” The little girl echoed her father. 

Newt sighed.

“It’s not fair, you two gangin’ up on me,” he said, but couldn’t hide his smile. Finally, he relented. “Alright, go ahead,” he said, waving a hand and settling himself even more snuggly against Thomas’s chest, turning his head and closing his eyes. The smile lingered, blossomed into a wide grin when he felt Thomas kiss the top of his head.

“Alright,” Thomas gestured with a hand as he began, “It all happened long ago and far away. Once upon a time there was an evil queen who built a giant Maze…”

“Hey, Lovebirds!” The call echoed across the beach, a brash female voice. Thomas stopped and looked up, but it was Newt who answered.

“Brenda,” he said, grinning as the short-haired young woman made her way across the sand, holding the hand of a boy about the same age as the little girl.

“Chickadee.” Brenda bent down to ruffle the girl’s hair when she got close. Since Thomas and Newt were Lovebirds, their daughter had started out as Love-chick, then just Chick, then eventually Chickadee. She responded to the nickname just as readily as her real name: Lizzy.

“You’re just in time,” Newt said, gesturing at the sand in front of them. “Tommy was about to tell a story, though I don’t think it’s a very good one…”

“ _Dad!_ ” Lizzy practically shouted. “I wanna hear about the Maze and the monsters and the evil queen!”

“Oh?” Brenda quirked an eyebrow. “That kinda story, huh?” She looked down at the little boy with jet black hair and olive skin whose hand she held. “Think you’re old enough for a scary story, Benny?”

The little boy nodded up at his mother, his dark eyes wide.

“Well, I can see I’m outnumbered.” Newt closed his eyes again, the sun warm on his skin. He heard Brenda and Benny take a seat in the sand nearby, knew where they would be without opening his eyes: Brenda sitting close to Lizzy, Benny in her lap and laying against her chest while she leaned back on outstretched arms. He liked Benny; sometimes he could hardly believe that two personalities like Brenda and Gally could have created such a quiet, inquisitive child.

“As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted…” Thomas flinched back and laughed, and Newt could only imagine that Brenda had flicked sand at him.

“Once upon a time there was an evil queen who built a giant Maze - yes, Lizzy?”

Newt opened his eyes to see his daughter frantically waving a hand.

“What did she look like? Did she live in a castle?”

“She…yes, she did. Good question.” Thomas nodded. “She lived in a tall, dark castle that no one was allowed inside unless they obeyed her every command. Sometimes children would go into the castle and never come out.” He paused for dramatic effect, looking deadly serious as he stared at the children and they looked back at him with rapt attention. “Some say she used them in her evil experiments.” Newt coughed, and Thomas quickly moved on. “She had pale skin and blonde hair and always wore white. But the story’s not about her, remember? It’s about your dad and his friends, who were all sent to live in the Maze she had built.”

“Tell us about this Maze,” Brenda said, eyebrow quirking in humor. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Benny, pressing her face against the side of his.

“I’ve got this,” Newt said suddenly, waving away Thomas’s look of triumph at his decision to participate. He leaned forward while Thomas placed a hand on his back, rubbing gently. Newt didn’t start right away; he looked down at the sand in front of him, thinking, and then fixed Lizzy and Benny with a level stare. Finally, he was ready.

“The Maze,” he said, “was vast.” A hand swept out to encompass the beach and then he looked straight up at the sky. The children followed his gaze. “The walls were so tall, if you were standing right next to them you could barely even see the top. They were tall and grey and cold, and creeping ivy grew all over them. Sometimes there was mist, so you couldn’t see anything around you.”

Newt talked with his hands, his long fingers spread wide as he described the mist and his voice taking on a haunting lilt that quickly had the children entranced.

“Monsters stalked the Maze.” His hands leapt into claw-like shapes, fingers dancing in the air. “Looking for any wayward children to gobble up and eat. They looked like giant slugs with metal spider legs so strong they could crack stone, and they oozed a gross, foul-smelling slime.”

“ _Ewwwwwww!!_ ” Lizzy and Benny cried in unison.

“Ew, indeed.” Newt nodded. “The Maze was a terrible place and it was easy to lose your way. The walls even _moved_. You could hear them rumbling and scraping at night, along with the monsters shrieking in the distance.” 

“ _AAAAAAAAAGGHHH!_ ” Thomas boomed, jolting forward, the sound erupting from him so suddenly even Newt jumped. 

“Christ, Tommy,” he laughed. Meanwhile the children screamed; Lizzy nearly fell over, and Benny hid his face in his mother’s chest. Brenda, of course, merely smirked, looking unimpressed. Thomas burst into laughter, holding onto Newt’s shoulder for support.

“Daddy! That’s not _funny._ ” Lizzy pouted.

“Are you alrigh’ there, Benny?” Newt asked.

The boy peeked out at Newt and gave a single, slow nod, Brenda’s shirt still balled up in his pudgy fist.

“Good, because I haven’t even gotten to the good part - ”

“Oh, here we go kids,” Thomas said, playfully rolling his eyes. “We’re about to hear about - ”

“The Glade,” they said at the same time. Newt shot Thomas a look. Thomas lifted his hands in surrender.

“What’s the Glade?” Lizzy asked. Newt smiled fondly at her, his daughter’s repeated questions - more demands for answers, really - reminding him so much of Thomas. 

“The Glade, Lizzy, was where we all lived. We couldn’t live in the Maze, you see, because of the monsters and because there was no food. But the Maze was a huge circle and right in the center of it was the Glade.” Damn it all; even after all these years, and even after all the hell they went through, Newt couldn’t help the note of fondness that entered his voice whenever he spoke of the halcyon days of the Glade.

“You remember when daddy and I took you to the meadows, Lizzy?” He waited for his daughter to nod. “It was like that. Green everywhere; long grass and tall trees, birds and crickets that sang in the morning and at dusk. Mint leaves growing wild in the brush. Golden sunlight and dust motes drifting in the air…We had everything we needed, food, shelter. There was a barn with cows and pigs and goats, even a dog.” He chuckled. 

“And there were gardens,” he said softly. “An orchard. Bonfires at night.” He focused on the good things. His daughter didn’t need to know about the desperation, the loneliness that came from lost memories, the endless wondering what they’d all done to deserve being put in such an elaborate prison. People getting stung by Grievers and being banished to the Maze. Minho mapping the whole damn thing without finding a single way out. 

Years. Newt had spent _years_ keeping some semblance of an order to that place. He and Alby had kept the boys from each others’ throats, had wrested a life from nothing. Until one day when that bloody, damned, impulsive shank sitting next to him had shown up and changed his life forever. 

If not for Thomas, Newt would probably still be in that Maze. The Glade had been a seductive lie and it had taken someone like Thomas to burn it all down so they could forge a real life for themselves in a better place. But that had not been without its own price to pay.

Newt didn’t realize he’d fallen silent. Thomas, ever sensitive to Newt’s moods, only let him wallow for a moment before picking up the slack.

“So,” he said briskly, leaning forward and taking up the storytelling reins again, “the Glade was safe from the monsters - ”

 _Until it wasn’t,_ Newt thought, leaning his head on Tommy’s chest so he could feel the other’s heartbeat pressed against his cheek.

“ - but your dad and I, and all of our friends, we knew we had to get out. And the only way out was through the Maze. So one day we gathered everyone together at the entrance. We had spears and machetes, and Gally had rigged up bottles of his special…juice,” Thomas faltered, as he realized he hadn’t prepared a kid-appropriate version of the true story, and Newt, having foreseen this from the start, just shook his head. 

“Well, anyway, he put torn-up bits of shirts into the jars so we could light them with our torches and throw them at the Grievers and they’d burst into flames!”

It was at this point that Lizzy normally had a question, and Thomas paused, waiting. But the two children were staring at him with wide, round eyes, and even Brenda, who always had a biting quip or smart-ass comment in the chamber, held her tongue. Thomas opened his mouth to continue when suddenly, Benny spoke up.

“Daddy did that?” He asked, but it was Brenda he looked to for the answer.

“He most certainly did,” she said, rubbing the top of his head, smoothing out his dark hair. Newt’s heart ached at the unmistakable pride in her voice when she spoke of Gally, marking it down as one of the Good Things that had come out of this whole mess. He had a habit of cataloging each Good Thing, guarding them jealously, using them to form a barricade against the onslaught of doubts which usually took the form of the faces of the people they had lost along the way. But Gally, once an enemy, was now one of their closest friends. He was a gain. A Good Thing.

Thomas, as if sensing his thoughts, rubbed a hand briskly up and down Newt’s arm, shoulder to elbow. Another Good Thing.

Good Thing number three piped up: “I wanna hear the rest of the story!”

Apparently, Lizzy was getting impatient with her fathers’ slow glances and subtle touches, the things that made up their private, silent language that they had shared for nearly six years now. Brenda leaned over to whisper something in Lizzy’s ear, her hand cupped around her mouth, and the little girl giggled.

Newt leaned back into Thomas, arms propped up on his knees. He wasn’t going to tell this part of the story.

“We all rushed out into the Maze. Me and your dad, Gally, Minho, Clint and Jeff - ”

 _Chuck,_ Newt thought. _Alby, Winston…_ Names that Thomas left out of the story because Lizzy had never gotten the chance to meet them.

“We were all running for the door when the Grievers attacked. Now just one Griever was hard enough to deal with on its own. Can you imagine what we thought when we saw _three_ come after us? We thought we were done for.”

“Tommy,” Newt spoke up again, though this time there was just a hint of teasing in his voice, “Maybe this is too scary for them after all…”

Lizzy’s inarticulate, frustrated shriek silenced him at the same time that it put a smile on his face. Thomas picked back up without missing a beat.

“They were all around us. It was chaos. Everywhere I looked there were Gladers keeping the Grievers back with spears. Then some of us would rush forward with our machetes, trying to hack away at their metal legs, trying to get them down and immobile so we could finish them off. It wasn’t easy and people started getting hurt. A Griever got me good; I was trying to keep it off of Clint while Minho went in for the kill, but we lost track of one of the legs and it sliced my arm, right here.” Thomas pointed to the faded white line on his bicep, angling his arm so Lizzy and Benny could see the scar.

“Show off,” Brenda muttered.

“The Griever knocked Minho down,” Thomas said, doggedly pushing through Brenda’s snark, “and then it knocked _me_ down, and I lost my spear. It was standing over me and it was like time stopped. I was so scared I couldn’t move. I saw it rearing back, its big, ugly teeth dripping with slime as it opened its mouth. It was probably a second away from biting my head off when out of nowhere, and I mean _nowhere_ , your dad came flying through the air with a spear in his hand. He tackled the Griever and rammed the spear straight through its eye and out the other side of its face, screaming like a mad man. When the Griever didn’t go down right away he took out his machete and started hacking at it, damn near cut its head off from what I remember.”

Lizzy was looking at Newt with the widest eyes he’d ever seen, her mouth hanging open. Embarrassed, Newt shrugged and muttered,

“It made me angry.”

He remembered killing the Griever, vaguely. Not with any of the detail that Thomas clearly did. All Newt really remembered was seeing Thomas defenseless on the ground, feeling the spear in his own hands, knowing that he had to do something to stop his entire world from ending right there and then. It had been a selfish act, really. 

“Well, eventually the thing collapsed in a heap of slimy flesh and broken metal spikes and then your dad turned and looked at me, still on the ground and shaking like a newborn lamb, and reached out to pull me to my feet. He said, ’Alright there, Tommy?’ as cool as anything, and all I could do was nod at him, I couldn’t say a thing. He was my big damn hero, then just as much as he is now.” 

And Thomas finished the story by placing a kiss on Newt’s cheek. 

No one spoke for several seconds. Newt focused on the sound of waves lapping against the sand and seabirds calling to each other as they wheeled in the salty air overhead. It was Brenda who broke the silence.

“It’s a good story,” she allowed, “But it’d be better if I was in it.” 

“Where were you?” Lizzy asked. Brenda reached over to ruffle her curls.

“I was never in a Maze, Chickadee. I grew up in the Scorch.” She shot Thomas and Newt a look. “You think the _Maze_ was scary? Your dads here had no idea what they were getting themselves into when they broke out into the Scorch. Would’ve died a hundred times over if it weren’t for me being there to save their sorry asses.”

“You said ass,” Benny said quietly, chiding his mother.

“So did you,” she countered, and Benny’s mouth opened in shock.

Lizzy stood up and walked over to her dads, climbing into Thomas’s lap and leaning against his chest. But it was Newt she was staring at.

“Did you really do all that, dad?”

“I had to, love,” he murmured. He cupped the side of her face and she reached up to lay her own small hand over his, her tiny fingers brushing his knuckles. “I would never let anything hurt you or your father. You’re my everything.” Thomas had one arm wrapped around Newt, the other around Lizzy. Newt felt him tighten his hold on them both, his arm pressing urgently against Newt’s back, and he knew if he looked up he’d see tears of happiness in Tommy’s eyes. 

“See you later, Brenda,” Newt heard Thomas say in a voice raw with emotion, and Newt smiled. Brenda probably thought they were the biggest saps on the planet, but he didn’t care. He put a hand on Lizzy’s shoulder, just above where Thomas’s arm encircled her. Then he buried his face in the space between Thomas’s neck and chest, closing his eyes against the aching sweetness of the moment, the unparalleled joy of feeling the warmth of his entire universe pressed against him, breathing as one.

**Author's Note:**

> In case the name of their daughter alarms anyone, Newt's sister did not die. I named their daughter Lizzy (Sonya's name before the Swipe) because in my mind Newt and Sonya keep their new names, so Lizzy is a callback to their family before it was torn apart by WCKD, and they don't know their mother's name (to the best of my knowledge?).
> 
> I hope this all makes sense, I haven't read the books, just the wiki summaries and lots of fanfics.


End file.
